Rearview Mirror: Bertha Benz had key role in car’s success

Just inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, the wife of Carl Benz was much more than a typical German hausfrau

Carl and Bertha Benz on top of the 4-wheeler "Victoria" model in 1894Handout

Get in the car, drive to your parents’ house. Not much of a big deal today, but on July 21, a woman named Bertha Benz was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan, for doing just that.

Of course, there’s more to the story. The year was 1888, and it was the first long-distance auto trip taken by anyone, male or female. She was driving an entirely new invention, the gasoline-powered automobile. It had been developed by her husband, Carl Benz, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1984 for it. But it’s possible he wouldn’t even be remembered without Bertha, and the path to our modern vehicles might have looked much different if she hadn’t taken his car for a spin.

Bertha Benz ran the household and raised five children, but she wasn’t a typical German hausfrau of the day. Many people were tinkering with the idea of a self-propelled buggy, and when Carl took an interest, Bertha used some of her family’s wealth to form a new company, Benz & Cie., for him to work on his ideas. In an odd twist of fate, Carl produced his three-wheeled vehicle in 1886, the same year another German, Gottlieb Daimler, built a four-wheeled one. Most historians consider them to be the co-inventors of the modern automobile. Although they never met, their companies would eventually merge to become Mercedes-Benz.

Bertha did many tasks in the workshop, gaining knowledge that she would eventually use on the trip, and she helped Carl obtain a patent for his car. Carl called it the Patent-Motorwagen and improved it over three prototypes, the last known as the Type III. But he couldn’t interest buyers in it, and really, who could blame them? It was noisy and unfamiliar, and no one knew if they could even get it home without a breakdown. Carl was ready to call it quits, so Bertha hatched a plan.

Carl wouldn’t have approved, so early on an August morning in 1888, Bertha left him a note, and she and two of their teenaged sons pushed the car far enough from the house that he wouldn’t wake up when she started the engine. From their home in Mannheim, the three set off on a 100-kilometre journey to Pforzheim, where Bertha’s family lived.

It took almost 12 hours to get there, since the three-wheeled car had only a single-cylinder engine making 2.5 horsepower, and a top speed of 40 km/h. It ran on ligroin, a petroleum-based cleaning solvent, which had to be fed into the carburetor since there was no fuel tank. Bertha stopped at a pharmacy in Wiesloch to buy some; that store still exists, and is now advertised as the world’s first fuel filling station. It’s estimated the car’s fuel economy was 10 L/100 km.

Portrait of Bertha Benz and a newspaper drawing of Bertha buying fuel in Wiesloch on her tripHandout /
Mercedes-Benz

Her experience in Carl’s shop helped Bertha perform a few minor repairs, including cleaning a clogged fuel line with a hatpin, and using fabric from her garter to insulate an ignition wire. The car’s brake was a wooden block pressing against the wheel, and she stopped at a shoemaker’s store and had him put a piece of leather on it — the first automobile brake pad, perhaps?

Each time she passed a town, local papers reported on the car. She headed home after a few days of visiting her mother, driving a different route so even more people would see her; the total trip was about 220 kilometres.

Bertha also made a list of the car’s issues. Based on this, Carl added a gear to the two-speed transmission for climbing hills — they’d had to push the car up several of them — and better brakes.

The plan worked. Carl made and sold 25 copies of the car, and by 1894 was building four-wheelers. By 1899, Benz & Cie. was the world’s largest automaker. Carl also developed and patented several innovations, including double-pivot steering and the horizontally-opposed “boxer” engine.

Gottlieb Daimler didn’t live to see his company merge with Benz’s in 1926, but Carl Benz did; he died three years later. Bertha died in 1944 at the age of 95.

She becomes the fourth woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, following Alice Huyler Ramsey, inducted in 2000 for being the first woman to drive across the United States, in 1909; Denise McCluggage, inducted in 2001 as one of the first female motorsport writers as well as a race driver; and drag race champion Shirley Muldowney, added in 2005.

Only one original Patent-Motorwagen Type III exists today. It went to England at an unknown date and now belongs to a London museum. Although no one is absolutely sure, there are clues that it could have been the car Bertha Benz took out in August 1888 and drove not just to Pforzheim, but into history.